SAN DIEGO — Most of the locals had yet to arrive when Tate Carew rolled up at Linda Vista skateboard park on a recent Sunday morning.
Sporting a white cap with side-by-side logos of both Bay Area major-league baseball clubs, the 19-year-old Point Loma resident took a few easy laps around the 6 1/2-year-old public facility, giving little indication of his newly achieved status.
Carew shot to the top of qualifying for skateboard park at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris after winning the second-to-last qualifying contest in Shanghai in mid-May, and then clinched the No. 1 spot with a third-place finish in Budapest last weekend.
His performance was the tip of the sword for the young Americans, who also finished third, fourth and fifth in the international field of 44.
Before he heads back overseas to continue his Olympic journey, Carew hopes to cross off another item on his bucket list and win his first X Games medal this weekend at the Ventura County Fairgrounds.
“With the (Olympic qualifying) contests, it’s about consistency and making sure you’re keeping your placings high,” he said. “For X Games, it’s always about the best run possible.”
THE COMPETITION
Carew will be up against another tough lineup this weekend.
Keegan Palmer is the defending Olympic gold medalist in park and the No. 2 qualifier for Paris. The 21-year-old was born in San Diego and moved to Australia when he was as a 1-year-old.
The No. 3 qualifier is Gavin Bottger, a 17-year-old from Oceanside who has gone head-to-head against Carew since their pre-teen years.
Tom Schaar is the elder statesman on the U.S. team at 24.
Schaar missed out on qualifying for the 2020 U.S. Olympic park team by one spot, but last week came through with a sensational performance in Budapest, overtaking 23-year-old Jagger Eaton of Mesa, Ariz. for the final Olympic berth.
The former Malibu resident made a name for himself 12 years ago on the big ramps, becoming the youngest gold medalist in X Games history and the first to land a triple-revolution 1080 in competition.
As recently as last summer, Schaar won bronze in the MegaPark, which is not on the list of events this year, and has considerable experience in park as well, winning his first X Games medal in 2017 and most recently taking bronze last summer.
Then there’s 29-year-old Pedro Barros of Brazil, a six-time X Games gold medalist in park who took home silver in the 2020 Olympics.
“Everyone’s very dialed in right now,” Schaar said.
THE PROGRESSION
Nobody has a better perspective of the progression of skateboard park than Andy Macdonald.
“It’s come leaps and bounds,” he said.
The versatile skater pocketed five X Games silver medals in park from 1997-2010, hanging them alongside the nearly two dozen medals he’s won in vert.
Last weekend, the 50-year-old Massachusetts native made a remarkable run in Budapest to finish in the top 16 and qualify for Great Britain’s Olympic park team.
“I was going into it, like, close your eyes and swing for the fences,” said Macdonald, whose father was born in England. “It was seriously like a miracle that I was able to pull that off.”
Macdonald remembers when SuperPark was introduced at the 2008 X Games. An above-ground wooden course was installed within the parking lot of Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, complete with bowls, ramps, jumps and even a school-bus sized tunnel.
Fielding a competitive lineup for SuperPark proved to be the biggest obstacle because park specialists didn’t exist at the time, just guys like Macdonald who would skate anything.
“They were taking people from other genres of skating and seeing if they were interested in doing an event like that,” Schaar remembers. “They didn’t really have anyone that was, like, just strictly park.”
Some of the sport’s biggest names at the time, including Shaun White, Ryan Sheckler, Bob Burnquist and Bucky Lasek, took a hard pass on SuperPark after they discovered the layout was too tight and the surface too slow.
The five-man final ultimately included four skaters over the age of 30, including Macdonald.
“It was basically an X Games play to include more athletes that were being left out of vert and street,” Macdonald said. “Like, there was no in between.”
That began to change in 2016, when the International Olympic Committee approved skateboard park and street for the 2020 Tokyo Games. Interest in Olympic park qualifying was tepid among young Americans initially, but that began to change.
Now, skateboard park is one of the premier events at X Games..”The fact that (skateboard park) is in the Olympics has pushed it a lot, especially in the last six years,” Schaar said. “Now, there’s 100 kids that are mainly just focusing on skating park.”
Carew agrees that the progression has been dramatic, especially since qualifying for the 2024 Games began 16 months ago.
“The tricks are so much harder,” Carew said. “The lines people are taking, like the creativity, is finally starting to show, and I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to see this level of skating at the last Olympics and compare to how it would be in four, five, six years.”
THE ACCESSIBILITY
Macdonald, Schaar and Carew also credit the increased number of skateparks with the growing popularity of park competition.
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Upland-based California Skateparks has been at the forefront, designing and constructing a dozen skateparks in the Los Angeles and South Bay areas, eight in the Inland Empire, five in Orange County, two in the Long Beach area and others in Whittier, Sun Valley and Santa Clarita.
The company also built an indoor training facility in Vista, specifically designed for Olympic development.
“Governments are giving money toward the development of skateboarding and that includes building public facilities for kids to participate,” Macdonald said.
Schaar said he spends a lot less time and energy on the mega and vert ramps these days, opting to take advantage of the accessibility and camaraderie at the 30 skateparks within 20 miles of his San Diego home.
“I was having a lot more fun skating parks,” Schaar said. “Mega was kind of slowly dying out.”